by Tammy Salyer
He stops about five meters away and says, “Here,” while holding the splint out.
Before I realize what’s happening, Vitruzzi stands and moves past me toward him. She holds her pistol limply in one hand, and she’s walking as if she’s about to shake hands with the man. Has she lost her mind?
I jump forward and grab her by the shoulder, intending to pull her back behind cover. As soon as we’re both in the open, someone else in the tracker opens up with a rifle, the shots low and aimed at our legs. Fortunately, the man approaching us ruins their field of fire and they miss, but I shove Vitruzzi as hard as I can back behind the HR and dive for the cover of the e-pod with the rest of my momentum. Hitting the rocky soil with my knees—and sending a silent thanks to the god of combat for my kneepads—I get into a good firing position in anticipation of V hammering them with cover fire from her own T-Max. I wait. And nothing.
Risking a quick look over the pod, I see her still crouched behind the overturned hover-runner. She’s dropped the pistol beside her in the dirt and is hugging her knees like a child that’s seen something scary in the dark. I don’t see any blood or wounds anywhere.
Mystified, I shout, “V, you okay?”
I take the opportunity to get a couple more rounds at the tracker, which do no good, but she still doesn’t respond. Dammit! She’s freezing on me. I’ve seen it before, but she’s the last human on the planet I would have expected it from. From here, I can’t try and shock her to her senses. All I can do is yell at her and hope for the best.
“Vitruzzi! Pick up that pistol and cover me. I’m coming to you. Do you hear me?”
No. Goddamn. Response.
Pushing my back into the pod, I take a second to analyze the situation. Options, options. There are always at least two, but a lot of the time one of them is dying. The tracker crew isn’t doing any firing. Just waiting us out. They know we have nowhere to run, and they’ll have a clear shot if and when we break cover again. So that’s not an option.
There was a time when I never left my rack without explosives. What happened to the good old days? As I look around, all I have at my disposal are rocks, sand, dead-looking grass, and broken shards of atmo-shield from the pod. Nothing that goes boom.
Another quick peek shows V hasn’t moved. A round flies uncomfortably close to me, but I have enough time to see she’s adopted the look that every person in the system knows at this point after the war: the thousand-yard stare. The only thing she’s seeing right now are the horrors inside her own mind, both the real ones she’s witnessed and the ones she’s imagining on her own. Fuck. It’s worse than I expected. And from Vitruzzi, one of the most level-headed and stalwart women I know. My day just went from bad to absolutely drowning in used toilet water.
Except…maybe there’s some fuel left in the pod’s tank. It uses combustible fluid in its reverse thrusters for slowing down when it gets near earth. Vitruzzi and I hadn’t used up all the supplemental oxygen either. I might, just might, have what I need for an old-fashioned package of fuck-you. If the hull is as damaged as it looks, there’s a chance I can get the O2 tank off and roll it under the tracker.
The one piece of luck I have is the fact that the pod’s hatch is on my side. Pulling out my bolo, I lean inside and start attacking the upholstery of the seats. Soon nothing’s left but the frame. It’s fused to the steel cabinet that houses the O2 tank, but that’s okay. The small toolkit from the overhead bin gives up its screwdriver, and I’m able to disassemble the interior of the seat enough to get to the steel cabinet’s door.
It’s been quiet for too long, and I pop out of the pod to see what might be sneaking up on me. Vitruzzi—same. Tracker—still quiet. Diving back in, I’m inside the cabinet in seconds, but discover that the pressurized O2 tank is bigger than the cabinet’s opening. It’s made to be refilled but not removed. Goddammit!
“Aly.”
I jump back out and the sweat pours off my forehead, momentarily blinding me. “Aly,” Vitruzzi says again, and to my relief, when I blink the sweat away, I see her looking at me. But the expression on her face is about as close to panic as I’ve ever seen. “It’s over.”
“No, we’ll make it, V.” Trying to make the most of her lucidity—who can guess how long it’ll last?—I prompt, “Look inside the hover-runner. Is there anything in there like a grenade? Something we can toss at those cocksuckers?”
She stares at me like I’m from another planet for a minute, then turns her head to look inside the damaged vehicle.
“Give it up, ladies! You come out, we promise you won’t get hurt.”
Fantastic. We’ve arrived at the deal-brokering stage. I take a short second of pleasure knowing that their not knowing what we’re up to is making them more edgy than we are. That second ends quickly, though, because I also know they’ll get sick of waiting soon. That tracker could start up any minute and roll right over us.
“V! You have to hurry. Is there anything in there?”
She doesn’t answer and appears to be going catatonic again, so I give up thinking and just start doing whatever my instincts suggest. After I crank the refuel cap and interior valve off the side of the pod with my screwdriver, my nostrils are hit by the tank’s heavy, oily fumes in a nauseating wave. Next, I yank my utility vest off, followed by my jacket, and finally my shirt, tying the latter around the end of one of the internal support bars from the seat and shoving it down into the fuel tank. It comes back out dripping thick amber gel, which I light up with my portable torch. Black smoke immediately fills the air, the lack of a breeze making it hang around me in a gag-inducing cloud. Not that it matters. Hucking a nearby rock over the top of the pod and squeezing off a pair of rounds as a diversion, I take a quick—possibly final—breath and stand up with my flaming torch.
One solid swing of the carbine launches the blazing shirt onto the tracker’s window screen. It hits with a satisfying splat that shoots burning fingers of flame across the screen and down the front. The fuel gel isn’t going to burn itself out soon. With my momentary advantage, I streak to the hover-runner. Vitruzzi gives me a look so dark and full of despair that I can hardly believe she’s the same woman. What happened? What sent her over the edge?
Not that I have time for worrying about it now. Yanking my jacket back on, I can see from my original vantage point that the guy who’d come out has retreated back into the cab. Time is short; they’re not going to wait much longer. Scrambling through the meager entrails of the hover-runner and the former occupants’ clothes gets me nowhere. Turns out that’s okay, though. Before I have time to get more than averagely frustrated, another voice comes from the tracker.
“Friend of yours?”
People always describe it as a sinking feeling in your guts when you realize you’re totally screwed, but right now, what I’m experiencing feels much more like a gas ball of rage exploding in my guts.
“Say something, scav!” This is followed by the sound of someone grunting in pain.
Then a new voice says, “Are you survivors from the Galatea?”
Goddammit. It’s that kid I’d let go. The one who didn’t want to be a clever dead guy.
“We have more of your buddies in the back of the tracker,” says the tracker guy. “If you don’t come out, you’ll get to listen to them die.”
Buddies? That isn’t exactly the word I’d use to describe the other salvage crew. But…still, they could have survived. Or the scavenger could be lying. It could just be the one kid. I’d let him go once; is it my fault he wasn’t capable of making it on his own?
But that’s not me, not anymore. I can’t let them die for us.
Leaving the carbine and T-Max in the dirt, I grip Vitruzzi’s shoulder once again and pull her up beside me, our hands holding up the sky.
EIGHT
THE WAR
Of the approximately fifteen thousand soldiers originally occupying the PCA Celestial, more than half are foot soldiers—the ones with boots on the ground. And that’s all it take
s, combined with the might of a fleet cruiser and all of the ordnance and weaponry at its disposal, to take control of a moon or a planet with a population of more than a hundred times this. Corps training, Corps strategies, but most of all, Corps resources, are that good.
But we’re down to about ten thousand now, after Medina’s command early in the war to “restructure” the Admin-loyal troop faction. I’ll say this about Medina, she’s thorough. Her effectiveness scores as a fleet commander must have been among the highest in the prewar Corps. I still have a hard time believing she was central to the anti-Admin pockets of resistance ever getting off the ground and organizing. Someone this good at being a soldier is rarely anything but.
Still, she’s clearly as shrewd and politically competent as any Admin Director. It took more than polished lockstepping and persuasive order-barking to become the commander of one of the Corps’s twenty-five fleet cruisers. In her position, she’d have been a regular attendee of Capital Strategic Planning Summits, and would have had the ear of most of the leading Ministry advisors. Which is how she had everything she needed to raze their entire bastion to the ground.
I’m on the bridge rotation of my navigation team when Medina enters, ready for her new shift SITREP. I should be on the R&R we’d been offered, but the one constant truth about being ship-side for R&R is that boredom is a hundred times more insidious and soul crushing than nearly any human enemy. For that reason, I’d reentered my name on the duty logs. It’s better to be on flight-deck duty than sitting around waiting to get called into battle or hanging back when a company returns from combat and watching them pick the grit out of their skin.
We’ve remained in orbit around Broon, one of Spectra 6’s satellite moons, for the last forty or so hours, hiding on the moon’s dark side with all the Celestial’s cloaking systems running to keep the settlement and incoming and outgoing ships we’re surveilling from knowing we’re here. Another reason I’ve kept myself busy is because we’re just a few hours’ flight time from our old home, Agate Beach. The knowledge that we’re so close to what was the only place I had ever truly felt was home tugs at me, making me restless and more than a little dismal. I know I’m not the only one. Karl and Vitruzzi have had hair-trigger tempers since we got here. It must be so much worse for them. Agate Beach was their settlement, their life, for several years, before it was all ripped away. Ultimately, the Admin’s decision to arrest the Beachers and make us all outlaws had resulted in this war—though, knowing what I now know about the organized resistance Medina, Quantum, and many others had been planning since the Soldier’s Rebellion, it’s clear the war was coming no matter what. Destroying Agate Beach was the ignition, but the fires had already been set to burn.
But I try not to think about it—Rob Cross’s betrayal, Rajcik’s mad mission to destroy the Admin, Bodie’s death. None of it can be changed now. If there’s a future, we have to target it, because there’s nothing left in the past worth holding on to now.
Lieutenant Steward salutes Medina out of habit, then prepares to brief her on the last six hours that have passed since her off-duty rotation.
“Commander, they don’t appear to be any stronger than we initially assessed from our drone passes. Heat signatures and visuals suggest no more than three thousand bodies, and our mission analysts report an estimate of about eighty percent active combatants.”
“What do we know about their fighting force resources and equipment pool?”
“We cross-checked the data from both our drones and scouts and calculate their air forces to consist of only three active armed craft, forty unarmed craft, and fifty to sixty land craft. They have no detectable surface-to-air or surface-to-orbit weapons. The analysts predict the usual number of personal weapons.”
“No, they wouldn’t have surface-to-air ordnances. This is a makeshift settlement. Probably an outpost they erected hastily to refit damaged ships,” Medina says.
“That could be the case, Commander,” Steward agrees. “We’ve noted a number of troop transports, mostly former Corps but a few civilian, coming into and out of the settlement. Their behavior indicates supply transfer, but we haven’t been able to get close enough to get a solid fix on what they’re doing.”
“How much time is elapsing between takeoffs and landings?”
“Minimal. Between twenty minutes and an hour. A few remain overnight, but none have stayed for more than a day or two.”
“That kind of quick turnaround isn’t the behavior of damaged ships coming in for fixes,” Vitruzzi cuts in. “It’s possible they’ve set up a casualty collection point. They may be bringing wounded in for treatment.”
Vitruzzi showing up on the bridge out of nowhere is nothing new. Since the war started, she’s made it a point to be involved in most of the major operations’ planning, in one way or another. I haven’t missed that her visits usually coincide closely with Medina’s debriefings—particularly if any heavy actions have been predicted. Vitruzzi’s lack of trust in the war commander may not be explicit, but it’s definitely implied. So much so that tension between the two has become a topic of discussion among all of us who’ve crewed with Vitruzzi since Agate Beach.
Medina cuts her eyes in Vitruzzi’s direction, then turns to face her. “You have a good point, Doctor. Steward”—she turns back to her LT—“is that population count steady, or does it fluctuate?”
Steward spends a few seconds manipulating information from his console, then pulls up a series of graphs on the holoreader. The three of them look it over for a few seconds before Steward speaks. “This output plots the ship traffic patterns,” he says, pointing, “and this one, the population approximations based on different calculation variables. The pop counts lag behind by about thirty hours. We don’t have enough intel readers in the area to keep a steady flow of data, so we recalculate new baselines every six hours, then build a new population count data set from that, which accounts for the three-hour lapse. Numbers show a slight rise when new ships arrive, and intermittent larger drops, but without being able to do an actual person-by-person head count, we can’t tell who’s coming or going.”
“So the information here is three hours old?” Vitruzzi asks.
Steward hesitates before responding, and his eyes remain on Medina until the CO nods slightly. “That is correct.”
Vitruzzi says nothing, studying the graphs. From where I’m sitting in the navigator’s bench, I have to turn away from my controls halfway to watch them. Medina’s gray eyes land on mine, holding them, knowing that I’m eavesdropping. “Anything else, Lieutenant?” she asks, still staring at me.
Steward continues, “No, Comm—”
“Have you sent any scouts to follow the outbound ships?” Vitruzzi interrupts.
“Our primary objective has been to surveil this post. We don’t have the resources to send long-distance scouts,” Steward responds.
“So you’re saying you don’t know who’s down there, what they’re doing, where they’re coming from, or where they’re going.”
Steward’s carefully controlled neutral expression cracks for a moment, but his silence is the answer Vitruzzi expected. She addresses Medina, “Commander, it doesn’t appear to me that we’re doing any good by sitting up here making wild guesses. They could be doing anything down there. I think we need to put someone on the ground to take a closer look before we decide on any action.”
Ever calm, Medina’s eyes remain steady and clear as she nods her head. If she resents Vitruzzi’s unsolicited advising, she doesn’t let on. “I agree. Lieutenant, muster a force of thirty bodies, armed, and six battle-ready troop transports.”
“Medina, I think you misunderstood me,” Vitruzzi says. “Going in there hot isn’t what I had in mind. If we want intel, we can certainly get that without inviting—or instigating—a firefight.”
“As always, I appreciate your feedback, Doctor. I’m sure we can avoid bloodshed if this colony is nonthreatening. As you said, we need to get closer first to assess that.”
“Of course, but we can get close enough with one ship and a crew disguised as refugees or freelancers. We can see they’re mostly nonmilitary from the intel Steward has. There’s no point in—”
“Vitruzzi, this is my call. And it’s been made.” Medina’s voice is like a steel trap that’s been sprung. There’s no arguing. “Since you’re here, would you like to update me on our overall medical and casualty status for the day? If you need to get back to the med-deck, I understand. I can make my rounds down there per usual later. So…?” Medina lets the question hang, very much done discussing anything to do with Broon with Vitruzzi present.
NINE
The crash of the Galatea is like the old-Earth fairy tale of manna from heaven for these scavengers, but cleaning up after it seems to be just another day on the job for them. Two other survivors from the salvage crew and a handful of other people—settlers maybe—had been brought back to their camp on the track vehicle and locked inside this crudely built shack V and I now inhabit, the pieces comprising it scavenged from a hundred different derelicts and other debris. Despite its haphazard-looking construction, the walls are strong and unyielding to our efforts at breaking out.
When I say manna from heaven, it isn’t irony. This group looks like they’ve been here awhile, probably from the early days of the war, and in a camp this far from any food sources it’s obvious from the start that they’re willing to eat whatever falls into their laps. I’ve heard about gangs of people going this far over the edge. I would have been more than happy to never witness it firsthand.
After a short trip in the tracker, I’d spotted at least two more shacks like ours when we arrived just under an hour ago, and that unmistakable stench of burned bodies clings to the camp like mustard gas in a trench. Most of the shack’s occupants, like Vitruzzi and me, are basically uninjured, but everyone isn’t so lucky. A woman with one side of her head badly swollen has been in and out of consciousness since we were rounded up.
